An animation updates the value of a property over a period of time. An animation effect can be subtle, such as moving a Shape a few pixels left and right, or dramatic, such as enlarging an object to 200 times its original size while spinning it and changing its color. To create an animation in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), you associate an animation with an object's property value.

Target Values

The Int32Animation class creates a transition between two target values. To set its target values, use its From, To, and By properties. The following table summarizes how the From, To, and By properties may be used together or separately to determine an animation's target values.

The animation progresses from the value specified by the From property to the base value of the property being animated or to a previous animation's output value, depending on how the previous animation is configured.

Freezable Features

Because the Int32Animation class inherits from Freezable, Int32Animation objects gain several special features, which include the following: they can be declared as resources, shared among multiple objects, made read-only to improve performance, cloned, and made thread-safe. For more information about the different features provided by Freezable objects, see the Freezable Objects Overview.

To apply a local animation to a property, use the BeginAnimation method. This method takes two parameters: a DependencyProperty that specifies the property to animate, and the animation to apply to that property.

The following example shows how to animate the width and background color of a Button.

More Code

This example shows how to use a Storyboard to animate properties. To animate a property by using a Storyboard, create an animation for each property that you want to animate and also create a Storyboard to contain the animations.

A "From/To/By" or "basic animation" creates a transition between two target values (see Animation Overview for an introduction to different types of animations). To set the target values of a basic animation, use its From, To, and By properties. The following table summarizes how the From, To, and By properties may be used together or separately to determine an animation's target values.